Video Becomes Bigger Part of Instagram’s Explore

Instagram, the app originally designed around sharing photos, also allows users to upload videos. The videos are short, up to sixty seconds long, but can be a good way to capture a moment in a way a simple photo cannot. While videos on Instagram haven’t been too popular, the company is trying to improve this by personalizing recommendations.

This is part of a change to the Explore tab on Instagram, allowing you to leave your personalized feed and look at popular photos. You will see “channels”, curated playlists of particular types of content such as comedians or skateboarding.

Topic-based channels seems to be an attempt to compete with Vine, which allows users to place their videos in specific categories so users can watch a stream of related videos. Instagram’s topics are more fine-grained than categories, meaning users may get a better experience at the cost of fewer videos. With over 500 million users, that’s probably not something they’re too concerned about.

Video on Instagram is growing slowly, but solidly. Over the past six months, there’s been a 150% increase in the time spent watching Instagram videos.

If you want to watch Instagram photos or videos on your Android TV, download Santi for free. It’s an unofficial Instagram client optimized for TV. The developer of Santi states this feature in particular is currently not available to third-party developers, although it’s hard to say whether that will be true in the future if this feature takes off.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.